Category Archives: sex and gender issues

Over at Medium, Alex Byrne, who happens to be a professor of philosophy, and chair of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has written an article criticizing Anne-Fausto Sterling’s NYT Op-Ed, “Why Sex is not binary.” Click on the screenshot below to see Byrne’s take, which is pretty sensible. I also criticized […]

Have a look at this “self-care” list in HuffPo, and note that the concept of “self-care” is completely alien to men—at least of my generation, which, admittedly, is not the group at whom this post is aimed. Click on the screenshot. The Horror! The Horror! A quote from the piece: Whether the guy you’re gifting […]

Cordelia Fine, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, has carved out a niche for herself by attacking the notion that there are any evolved and genetically-based differences between males and females. Her books have been best-sellers (Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society book prize), probably because her […]

There are two reasons why folks are opposed to Betsy DeVos’s revised Title IX regulations for adjudicating sexual assault and harassment in colleges. The first is because the changes are proposed by a member of the Trump administration, and a particularly hated one. The second is that the general thrust of the changes protect the […]

Reader Bryan called my attention to Science magazine’s contest in which readers can vote for the scientific breakthroughs of the year. As the site says (click on screenshot below): It’s that time of the year again: Science’s reporters and editors are homing in on the Breakthrough of the Year, our choice of the most significant scientific […]

Andrew Sullivan, whose increasing self-imposed distance from Trumpism now makes him at least a centrist, has a good column in this week’s New York Magazine. Half of it is about the dangers of global warming and the malfeasance of Republicans in not just ignoring it, but exacerbating it. The other half is about whether or […]

Lots of sites, including three scientific societies, have rejected the new Health and Human Services guidelines that provide a classification of a person’s sex into two categories. But these sites, and now an article in the prestigious journal Nature (click on screenshot below), conflate “sex”—which I take as biological sex recognized in humans by chromosomal constitution, […]

This is just another example of the Authoritarian Left cutting off its nose to spite its face. The Ann Arbor News (from Michigan) reports the following (click on screenshot): Most of you have heard about Eve Ensler‘s play “The Vagina Monologues,” first produced in 1996. It’s become an iconic feminist work and has raised a […]

As I wrote last week, I think the only thing that the Trump administration has done that has improved our country is to issue, through the much-despised Betsy DeVos, new guidelines for adjudicating accusations of sexual assault and misconduct in American universities. (Do I really need to add here that I think DeVos’s appointment was […]

In my view, the only good thing that the Trump administration has done is to revise the standards American colleges should use to judge sexual misconduct of students. These changes are, I think, fairer to both accused and accuser than were the previous standards proposed by the Obama administration under its Title IX “Dear colleague” […]